THEATRE REVIEW: SAINT CARMEN OF THE MAIN
12 FEB/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Talk about staying power. Almost 2,500 years after its heyday, classical Greek theatre is still with us, its forms — from deus ex machina to Greek chorus — still informing contemporary theatre on the world's stages.

And while playwright Michel Tremblay probably wasn't aspiring to be some sort of latter-day Sophocles when he penned his SAINT CARMEN OF THE MAIN as a rallying cry for fellow Quebec separatists in 1976, he nonetheless applied the Grecian formula with a heavy hand. A tale ripped from the underbelly of old Montreal — a world of hookers, misfits and petty criminals huddled around the fictitious Rodeo Club, near the corner of rue Saint Laurent, otherwise known as the Main, and rue Sainte-Catherine — Saint Carmen is essentially a story of a people in the process of finding its voice. And while, as written, it offers a powerful argument in favour of Tremblay's separatist cause, it also finds resonance with any group struggling to define itself and find its voice, which accounts in no small part for the revival that opened at the Bluma Appel Theatre Thursday in a co-production between Canadian Stage and the National Arts Centre.

Working with a new translation by long-time Tremblay interpreter Linda Gaboriau, director Peter Hinton and designer Eo Sharp make the most of the Grecian connection too, heightening the ancient classical reference points even while they strive to make it a work very much of the modern world. As the sun comes up on their Main, a chorus of hookers and transvestites all arrayed in blood red, led by Sandra (Robert Persichini) and Rose Beef (Karen Robinson) await the return of the Carmen of title.

A native of the area who rose to prominence singing country and western tunes, Carmen is coming home after a sojourn in Nashville, where she has learned a country trick or two. Played by Laara Sadiq, Carmen arrives looking like Lady Gaga making a wrong turn on Rodeo Drive, but that's more than good enough for the adoring Harelip, a downtrodden lesbian, played by Diane D'Aquila, who serves as her dresser. But not everyone shares Harelip's joy in this homecoming. Maurice (Jean Leclerc), the amoral owner of Rodeo, is unimpressed with Carmen's new voice and wants her to do the same thing she's always done, only better, while Gloria (Jackie Richardson), the Spanish singer who ruled Rodeo's stage before Carmen, wants it back . In this, she has the aid of Toothpick (Joey Tremblay) a thug who is apparently only packing a grudge.

That the denizens of the Main are thrilled to find Carmen singing songs about them rather than cowboys only serves to make the homecoming queen more dangerous. Tragedy of classical proportion ensues. In the process, however, Hinton (a director who never lets a good play get in the way of a concept) goes Grecian with such a heavy hand that the very human elements of the story are all but swamped by his vision. While Gaboriau captures elements of Quebecois joual in her new translation, Hinton and Sharp strip the story of time and place, in a setting more of the temple than the street — a world where there is definitely no sex in secular.

For all of their costuming excesses, the chorus emerges as oddly asexual — a religious order with very bad habits — while Sadiq's Carmen all but disappears under wig and make-up that render her all but invisible from the neck up. In this production, it's not in the translation from French to English that Carmen loses her way finally, but in the translation from English to Greek.